“20Brethren, do not be children in your thinking; yet in evil be infants, but in your thinking be mature. 21In the Law it is written, ‘By men of strange tongues and by the lips of strangersI will speak to this people, and even so they will not listen to Me,’ says the Lord. 22So then tongues are for a sign, not to those who believe but to unbelievers; but prophecy is for a sign, not to unbelievers but to those who believe.”
While Paul refers to all believers as “children of God” and can affectionately speak of the Corinthians as “my beloved children” (1 Cor. 4:14), he calls on them to “not be children in your thinking.” In other words, they need to think clearly and maturely about the subject of tongues. We recall his follow-up to the sonnet of love, “When I was a child, I used to speak like a child, think like a child, reason like a child; when I became a man, I did away with childish things” (1 Cor. 13:11). Yet today many chase after a childish experience of the flesh under the guise of “speaking in tongues.”
The background to this spiritual gift is rooted in the Old Testament, Isaiah 28:11, which is a judgment on Judah through the foreign-speaking nation of Assyria. Since His people would not listen to the prophets, God would, as some commentators interpret, speak to them through the invading armies, who would mimic prophets with their slurs and ridicule. With this backdrop, Paul writes that the foreign language of tongues (that is, the spiritual gift of speaking in an otherwise unknown human language) is meant as a sign of judgment.
If, on the other hand, the “non-believers” referred to here are Jews who hardened their hearts to the gospel (and there was a large Jewish population in Corinth), then Isaiah’s words should reverberate in their consciences as they heard the Corinthians evangelizing in other languages.
The mature way of thinking, then, is to value prophecy in the church, for it is the “sign” given to genuine believers, and not tongues. How ironic that so many look to tongues as a sign of greater spirituality, when God gave tongues as a sign of judgment. Could it be that many wanting a tangible proof of God’s work in their life abandon genuine faith? “Now faith is the assurance of thingshoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Heb 11:1).
Lord, I choose to believe in Your Word and not in a “spiritual” experience.
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